Although Socialist Man in the end fails to live up to an
admittedly faulty blueprint, his capitalist cousin Cyborg grows and flourishes
in 20th century consciousness. Bruce Grenville's presentation at the Vancouver
Art Gallery is an introduction to the idea of the Cyborg - its history,
its many layers of meaning and potential.

The exhibition, though not large, is comprehensive and contains
a number of outstanding works, particularly Tony Oursler's Vanish,
Fernand Leger's Le mechanicien (1920), Epstein's Rock Drill
(1913-16), Kenji Yanobe's Yellow Suit (1991) as well as gorgeous
early 20th century photographs by Lewis Hine. Video of Survival Research
Laboratories subversive robot-performances mock and satirise the military-industrial
complex. Concurrent performances and lectures by Stelarc and Perry Hobermann
at the Western Front in mid-February complements the exhibition. Contextualising
the art works are artefacts that span the art-popculture divide: a number
of film and videos such as Chaplin's Modern Times critique of industrialisation,
Verhoeven's ground-breaking Robocop and Cronenberg's Videodrome,
as well as anime Ghost in the Shell and more, though Tetsuo the
Iron Man is, unaccountably, missing.

The exhibition, its excellent catalogue, and series of gallery
talks and debates provide much food for thought in treating the Cyborg as
a historical, philosophical, psychological, social and technological phenomenon.
The show raises many issues, among them the dichotomy of utopia/dystopia,
feminist theory, post-colonial theory.

One of the strongest aspects of the exhibition is the inclusion
of significant art-works by Japanese and Korean artists, supplemented by
essays in the catalogue by critics Toshio Ueno, Makiko Hara and Masamori
Oda.. These works highlight the East-West problem of the "techno-Orientalist"
gaze - challenging the pop-culture notion of Japanese as "geeks" and automatons,
and of Japan as a futuristic Cyborg-nation inspiring both fascination and
fear. (Toshio Ueno, "Japanimation and Technorientalism," The Uncanny
223)

The idea of unnaturally-created humanlike non-humans can be traced quite
far back in Western culture, at least as far as the Jewish legend of the
Golem, and comes into social consciousness at very the point when Enlightenment
ideas converge with Romanticism to produce young Mary Shelley - and her
novella Frankenstein. Since then, the advances of science have brought the
possibilities of a Cyborg future ever closer, and the Cyborg, the man/machine,
invests us with a visual metaphor for our anxiety at the growing presence
and, more importantly, our growing dependence on technology. But, according
to Donna Harraway:

>> The Cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a fusion of the organic and
the technical forged in particular, historical, cultural practices. Cyborgs
are not about the Machine and the Human, as if such Things and Subjects
universally existed. Instead, Cyborgs are about specific historical machines
and people in interaction that often turns out to be painfully counterintuitive
for the analyst of technoscience. (Donna J. Harraway, "[email protected]_Millennium.
FemaleManŠ_Meets_OncoMouse." p 51

>> Cyborg technologies can be restorative, in that they restore
lost functions and replace lost organs and limbs; they can be normalising,
in that thev restore some creature to indistinguishable normality; they
can be ambiguously reconfiguring, creating posthuman creatures equal
to but different from humans, like what one is now when interacting with
other creatures in cyberspace or, in the future, the type of modifications
proto-humans will undergo to live in space or under the sea having given
up the comforts of terrestrial existence; and they can be enhancing,
the aim of most military and industrial research, and what those with Cyborg
envy or even Cyborgphilia fantasize. (p. 3)